Local and global existence for the Ericksen-Leslie problem in unbounded domains

Abstract

The work deals with the Ericksen-Leslie model for nematic liquid crystals on the whole space, the half-space and on exterior domains with smooth boundary. The crystal orientation is described by a unit vector that is a small perturbation of a fixed constant vector. We prove, through a combination of energy method with dispersive a priori estimates, a local existence and a global existence for small initial data by a contraction argument asking low regularity assumptions on the initial condition.